While the creators of the PDF format long ago surrendered its technology to all, Adobe has continued to refine its own Acrobat software. That storied tradition continues with the release of Adobe Acrobat XI on Monday.

Despite early criticisms of the iPad as a device for content consumption rather than creation, a wide range of third-party productivity solutions continue to flourish in the App Store. One of newer kids on this block is Polaris Office, a suite from Korean developer Infraware promising to bring the Microsoft Office experience to iOS for cheap (currently $9.99; regularly $19.99). Better known on the Android platform where it’s preinstalled on select carrier-branded handsets, Polaris Office made the leap to iOS this year with an all-in-one solution for viewing and editing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on the go.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to create content. We've shown you before how to create your own webpages with it, but did you know you could make presentations, too? Forget Powerpoint and Keynote. With Markdown Presenter, you can create simple, quick presentations using just a simple text editor. Read on to find out how.

It’s hardly a new rumor: Microsoft Office is widely expected to arrive on the iPad at some point in the future, given how Redmond has been embracing the platform with practically all of its other software. But a new report claims it may be a little closer to reality than previously thought.

Cloud-based services have fast become The Next Big Thing, particularly for mobile devices with always-on data connections. OnLive is a pioneer in this category, providing cloud-based gaming to a rabid user base for some time now, but what’s in store for the company’s second act? How about an iPad app that brings a slick, touch-based Windows 7 experience complete with Microsoft Office and 2GB of cloud storage, all for free? OnLive Desktop makes it possible.

We feel your pain, Office 2011 users--and so does Microsoft. While the release last fall of Microsoft’s seminal productivity suite took great strides in bringing Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for Mac into parity with the Windows versions, it also fell woefully short in a few key areas. Help is on the way as an SP1 update for Office 2011 will be released next week, and the main new feature is improved syncing. But there’s a catch…

We've seen what Apple could dish up when it came to word processing, and we've seen the competitors bring occasionally impressive functionality to this realm. We've even seen word processing on the iPhone, which, while not glamorous or particularly easy, is still nice. Spreadsheets were likewise a solid contender for data crunching even if there were some major shortcomings in the apps which sought to dethrone Numbers from its rightful place.

The third and final installment is at last at hand. Presentations, the scourge of corporate meetings.

Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac has been out for a little while now, but in case you're still on the fence, Redmond has decided to sweeten the deal a little bit, by launching free 30-day trial licenses for the software, to let you take it for a test drive. After that, you can make the decision for yourself whether to proceed with purchasing the productivity suite.

Microsoft Office has always had a lot of features--too many features, some would say. With menus inside of menus, palettes aplenty, and toolbars crammed with tiny buttons, the biggest problem with Office was finding the features you needed without being bogged down by the ones you never touched. Plus, with the Mac version of Office lagging at least a year behind the Windows suite, feature parity could be an issue, so Mac users often felt like second-class citizens over, for example, the lack of VBA macros.